Compression and flushing blanks

[Neelakantan Lakshminarayan]

I have a problem with blanks that I'm writing to a compressed Servlet response stream and flushing at regular intervals not getting through to a browser(IE, Mozilla) promptly. I have a servlet performing intensive DB queries and in order to prevent the timeout of the socket connection with the client, I write and flush blanks at frequent intervals - every 20 seconds. This works fine. However, when I create a gZipOuptputStream - in order to compress the response - and write to this stream, I find that the blanks do not get through to the client promptly. There seems to be some buffering happening - I'm not quite sure where. This, of course, negates the purpose of my writing blanks. Anybody familiar with this problem and any solutions? I thought perhaps this is an issue with the implementation of java.util.zip  - but I'm not positive. Thanks, Neela